ABSTRACT
The field of EU studies has a proud tradition of generating theoretically informed knowledge about European integration and European supranational governance. EU studies researchers are not necessarily disinterested in influencing policy-makers, but the primary purpose of their collective endeavour is routinely advertised in terms of the development of robust explanation or deeper understanding. Like most social scientific work, the field of EU studies is premised upon the tenet that the objects it studies are largely separable from the subjects (researchers) who generate knowledge about those objects. It follows that the generation of truths about the world should occur without undue interference from that world. However, once formulated, social scientific knowledge — in the form of data, ideas, concepts and arguments — can be put to use in the world. Indeed, the entire sociology of knowledge/science project upon which this special issue draws constitutes an emphatic rebuttal of the simple and ordered separation of subject and object. This contribution offers further ammunition in support of this general critique of the supposed internal/external division in social science, and in so doing directly questions the degree to which theories of integration have been exterior to the processes that they describe (see also Vauchez 2010). It does so via the use of an especially interesting case: the interplay between the communicative and coordinative policy discourses of the early European Commission, on the one hand, and contemporaneous social scientific theories of the processes over which that very emergent supranational policy actor was presiding, on the other. The argument of this article is that, during the 1960s, the newly-formed
European Commission drew extensively on the ‘live’ knowledge archive of both international economics and political science to generate a strategic narrative about not only what European economic integration entailed and how it would be accomplished, but also (crucially) about what kind of actor it (the Commission) was. At the same time, the semi-inductive quality of academic knowledge production meant that the Commission’s activities were being theorized simultaneously into the live archive from which it was drawing. It is important to emphasize that the focus here is quite specifically on the work done by both general understandings of the nature of integrating (European) economic space and narratives of how integration proceeds. As such the article pays less attention to the ways in which particular schools of economic analysis have informed and influenced the
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Commission in particular and the European supranational policy process more generally. The literature here is substantial (see, inter alia, Colliat 2012; Dullien and Gue´rot 2012; Gerber 1998; Jabko 2006; Maes 1998, 2004a, 2004b; McNamara 1999; Snaith 2014) and its insights are not unimportant to the discussion here. The following should thus be read as supplementary to the extant research rather than as a substitute for it. The article proceeds in the following steps. It begins with a classification
of types of economic ideas that might secure traction or influence within the policy world. Whereas much of the discussion of the influence of economic ideas on policy tends to focus on broad systems of economic thought (such as ‘neoliberalism’), this piece draws attention to two other sub-types of economic idea, labelled here ‘bodies of economic thought’ and ‘generalizable claims about macroeconomic truth’ that seem to be especially important in story of European integration. The article then examines relevant examples of each genre that emerged in Economics in advance of or concurrently with the emergence of the European Communities. The relationship between these and neofunctionalist theories of integration is discussed. The main empirical section of the paper considers how metaphors of the quality and dynamics of integrating European economic space were central to Commission discourse through the 1960s and into the 1970s. The article concludes with some reflections on how this case contributes to more general considerations in the sociology of knowledge.
